Guns Germs & Steel

There's a significant portion of Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs & Steel that's devoted to hunter vs. gatherer debate. I'd like to chalk up these past weeks to "hunting" or perhaps, "being hunted", and also "gathering" material for future blogs. I'm going to call it a sabbatical. As some of you may know, over the past few weeks I've been embroiled with some craziness that will give me a fireside story to tell for the rest of my days. In fact, last night I was at a clambake, and as we were sitting around a fire at about 11:30p, not 100% sober, I unleashed this beast of a story on a few friends by the fire and definitely "ooh-ed" and "ahh-ed" and "holy-shitted" the crowd for a solid 30 minutes. This story is going to take more than a single blog to tell so at some point I'll get to it. There's still not an ending so as I look for closure on this thing I'll think about how I want to tell it.

Last time I dropped some knowledge was around July 4th. I'm now 7 weeks into my 10 week internship. So far so good. I don't want to bore you with the details of the actual work, but all I'm going to say is that I'm hoping that there's an offer at the end of the rainbow because the more I look at Michigan's upcoming football schedule the more I look forward to the possibility of not having to recruit again right in the middle of it all. Apparently I find out about an offer on the last day of work. I kind of envision it going down in a Gladiator-like fashion, when I step into a room, the king/head recruiter gives me a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and I either die (inside, of course) or I live to fight another day.

Oil is at what?!!

In this type of market you have to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. And if I'm going down, I'm at least going down with a mouthful of sushi. When I first started working in New York I was always jealous of my friends who got their lunch and dinners paid for by their companies. Meanwhile, I was getting paid less than I would've liked and took to brown-bagging it a solid three to four days a week. How great would it be to have the company pay for dinner, and on top of that, it would even be possible to use my credit card, get the miles, and then expense it back to the company. The equation was simple... eat food = see the world. As I sat at my cube eating the same turkey on wheat day after day I dreamed of the day I'd be able to use Seamless Web on the company's account. Well that day came this summer, and it came in the form of a $25 dinner allowance. The first time I ordered, I ordered $25 of thai food for myself. I stuffed my face as I sat alone at my desk, finishing up my work. If I had to work through dinner it might as well be with a stomach full of pad see ew...and soup...and me krob...and some dessert. At about 8:30pm I sat at my desk, wanting to vomit, and all I had in front of me were five empty takeout dishes and two more hours of work. It took about thirty minutes to realize that staying at work and ordering food sucked, regardless of what my dinner allowance was.

I really haven't had to stay late a whole bunch this summer, which I suppose is good, but I can 100% understand why some of my friends who are bankers put on some serious lbs. when they started work. If you are ordering on someone else's dime, maybe you order that extra sushi roll in case you want it, and of course you end up eating it when you probably didn't need to. And if you do that for a year, that one extra yellowtail roll really ends up being 30-40 extra yellowtail rolls, and that extra side of cornbread becomes 30-40 extra sides of cornbread, and the only thing Seamless about any of this is the transition to bigger pant sizes. I'm not advocating smaller meal stipends, although I wouldn't be surprised to see them shrink in this market, but I am advocating restraint, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of well-being. I know that as soon as I realize I'm staying for dinner I start planning out where I'm going to be seamless webbing later that night. Not good. I acknowledge that I'm still an amateur at this and I suppose that if I did this more often I'd be able to find my sweet spot where I could eat, eat quickly, eat healthfully, and get my work done and leave, but with a whopping seven weeks of seamless web experience I'm still struggling with the whole, "my eyes are bigger than my stomach" thing.

I guess practice makes perfect though. I just feel lucky that I've been able to avoid ordering seamless web for dinner at around 8:00pm and then ordering breakfast at 5am the next morning. Some of my fellow Michigan summer associates haven't been as lucky, because as Snoop Dogg would say, they may come in at 10:00am but "they ain't leaving 'til 6 in the, 6 in the morn". Anyway, I've got about nine more hours until my bacon egg and cheese sandwich tomorrow morning and the faster I can get to sleep the closer I can get to my beloved breakfast sandwich.